As any cool kid will tell you, the most important palette you can wear is on your sneakers. Luckily, most of the shoe industry is right on track with the newly developing long-tail, Limited Edition, Artist Series, Custom Designed and DIY markets, which includes any color lover who has the perfect palette to show off on the streets.

Custom Sneakers

Most of the major brands have jumped on the DIY sneaker design track, but not all the sites are the same. While I didn’t go through every shoe site, here are a few that even if you are not about to buy a new pair of shoes, will at least keep you busy and distracted as you go through all the colorway options available.

Converse

Link

• Shoes: 12 styles
• Materials: Canvas, Suede, Leather
• Colors: 30 colors and patterns
• Delivery Time: 2 to 4 weeks

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Many of you here in the community are quite familiar with the color tools available on COLOURlovers (if you’re new to the site a good place to start is the FAQ), but what about other helpful color tools that might exist somewhere on the internet. Well, here are two such tools: ‘Name That Color‘ and ‘Color Name & Hue‘, that I came across recently; one for color vocabulary and identification, the other, a helpful tool for those who are colorblind.

‘Name That Color’

‘Name That Color‘ is a helpful little site created by a dude with other dudes in mind, but it most certainly will also help those of the female variety.

For those of us who can’t exactly remember, or who never knew, what color Danube is, and others who just want to expand their color vocabulary, so instead of red you can use Monza, even though it is totally just Red, might want to check it out.

Simply create a color manually or enter the Hex code to reveal what you mistakenly took for Mojo, when it was, in fact, Mule Fawn.

The database was created from names found on Wikipedia, Crayola, and the Resene Color-Name Dictionary. It’s probably good that he didn’t try to use the COLOURlovers library of color names. Besides what an interminable task it would be, he would probably have more than a few colors with the same name, but that are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum, or, all the colors would be named ‘love.’ And while I personally prefer to make up color names on-the-fly, like the Suddlepup shirt I’m currently wearing, it might be nice to be able to narrow it down to around Burnt Sienna if, god forbid, you had to discus color with your designer or decorator over the phone.


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We thought it was time to check in on our most loved Palettes, Colors and Patterns making their way around the community at the moment.

With 108,705 members who have created 1,196,974 Colors, 431,454 Palettes and 133,971 Patterns, we needed a way to divide up all the colors into a manageable post, as to avoid creating an overwhelming color explosion that might lead to the mind collapse of some poor blog reader. So, we are doing it by color, of course. Here are 50 of the top Palettes, Colors and Patterns from the community, starting with RED.

Red Palettes

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Inspiration from the colors of the great impressionists, plus some information about each painting and artist from wikipedia.

For more information about each artist or to see more of their work, just click on any image.

Armand Guillaumin: La Place Valhubert.
		Born in Paris, France, he worked at his uncle’s lingerie shop while attending evening drawing lessons. He also worked for a French government railway before studying at the Académie Suisse in 1861. There, he met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro with whom maintained lifelong friendships. While he never achieved the stature of these two, his influence on their work was significant. Cézanne attempted his first etching based on Guillaumin paintings of barges on the River Seine.

Armand Guillaumin: Sunset at Ivry
		Noted for his intense colors, major museums around the world display Guillaumin’s art. He is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, the Creuse département, and the area around Les Adrets-de-l’Estérel near the Mediterraneran coast in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France. Armand Guillaumin died in 1927 in Orly, Val-de-Marne just south of Paris.

Claude Monet: Grainstack, Sunset
		The primary subjects of all of the paintings in the series are stacks of hay that have been stacked in the field after the harvest season. The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series begun the autumn of 1890 and continued through the following spring, using that year’s harvest. Some use a broader definition of the title to refer to other paintings by Monet with this same theme. The series is known for its thematic use of repetition to show differences in perception of light across various times of day, seasons, and types of weather. The subjects were painted in fields near Monet’s home in Giverny, France.

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The umbrella or parasol, brolly, gamp, parapluie and bumbershoot, as it is also known in other names, is one of man’s oldest artifacts. Its long history spans great empires and interminable distances, and has been on record since there were records for things to be on. The history dates back just far enough that there is no conclusive evidence or agreement among brolliologists, those who study umbrellas, of the its true origin. Nor is it agreed upon whether it was first used as protection from the sun or from the rain.

Below is a wonderfully interesting article about umbrellas that I found over at the Big Site of Amazing Facts, mixed in with a little color inspiration.

Photo by dearoot

The umbrella is so old that brolliologists can’t agree on its origin, or decide whether it was first used for protection from the rain or the sun. They do know that it was employed as an item of religious and ceremonial regalia from the earliest days of ancient Egypt. Egyptian mythology held that the visible sky was actually the underbelly of a god stretched from one end of the earth to the other like an immense umbrella. Hence, in contemporary art, priests and Pharoahs were often placed in the shade of an umbrella to symbolize royal and religious power.

Assyrian tablets dating from 1350 B.C. depict a king leading his retinue while servants shade the royal head with a long-handled parasol. In India, a religious group known as the Jains called their ultimate heaven of perfected souls by a name that translates as “The Slightly Tilted Umbrella.”

Photo by Elizabeth Thomsen

The early Greeks used the umbrella as a symbol of productivity and sexual aggression, usually associated with the god Bacchus, and they carried umbrellas in many of their parades and festivals. In later centuries, the Greeks put the umbrella to a more utilitarian use as a sunshade, and developed sunshade hats similar to the sombrero.

The Romans, too, used parasols against the sun. Women attending chariot races in the amphitheatre sometimes dyed their parasols to denote their favorite chariot team. If you’ve ever attended a football game in drizzly weather and have been annoyed to no end by umbrellas blocking your line of vision, you may find it comforting to know that the Romans had a similar problem at their games, with a hot dispute over parasol use finally decided by the emperor Domitian, in favor of the sunshade.

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We thought we would take a look at some of the best designed color compositions from across the web. Organized by base color, we searched through the CSS galleries over at Design Meltdown and CSS drive to find some websites whose color palettes we think are great.

BLACK + WHITE

rafaelzundt.com

gleamix.jp

imagineboris.com

canvasmagazine.ne


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As more people are using bicycles as their main form of transportation, especially within metropolitan areas where most people only travel a few miles everyday, sharing the roads has become more of an issue.

In an attempt to raise public awareness and start a dialog about the rights of cyclists and the problems with our current road sharing systems, people across the country, and across the world, are creating Ghost Bikes as a memorial to those who have been struck or killed while riding on the public streets.

Photo by Howard Kaplan

What Are Ghost Bikes

Ghost Bikes are bikes that have been built from scrap or donated parts that can no longer be reused. They are stripped of all unnecessary parts that could potentially be desicrated or reclaimed for scrapes, painted stark white, then fixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed.

Photo by wiki

The History of Ghost Bikes

The first ghost bike was erected in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003 by Patrick Van Der Tuin. He got the idea after witnessing a cyclist get hit by a car in the bike lane. He painted and placed a bike frame with a hand painted sign using red lettering which read: “Cyclist Struck Here.” Since then, similar projects have started across the US and other cities worldwide.


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This is the fourth post in a series on English Color Etymologies. Today we are looking at the colors that come from the names of places and foreign words.

English is a colorful language. Since its birth among the tribes of Europe, English has built its color vocabulary with the wealth of words it has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. Collected here are 172 colors that standard dictionaries (I used the American Heritage and the Random House) classify as specific color nouns (these do not, of course, include the standard ten – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, grey, white – or any Crayola inventions). This treasure of colors is broken down by etymological origin: is the color the name of a flower, an animal, or even a historical person? Some colors appear twice (when I felt two origins were sufficiently different). Others appear only once though they could certainly fit into several categories.

Ever wonder how a color got its name? Refer to the following and enjoy your new grasp on color!

PLACES

Photo by gadl

From Europe to Asia, place names have become color names. It is not surprising that Italy, birthplace of the Occidental Renaissance, contains many such places.

From Pompeii, Italy (and the color found on the walls of its houses).	From Venice, Italy.
From Burgundy, France (and the color of its wine).	From Sienna, Italy (short for: terra di sienna, ‘the color of the earth in Sienna’).
From Manilla, Philippines (and the color of manilla hemp used to make the paper).	From Champagne, France (and the color of its sparkling wine).
From Cambodia (and the resin of trees specific to southeast Asia).	From Chartreuse, France (and the green liquor made by the monks living there).
From Prussia. The dye was discovered by a man living in what is now Berlin (and was Königsberg, the Prussian capital, at the time).	From Lajward, Turkestan (where a stone of similar color was mined).
From Lajward, Turkestan, modern-day Afghanistan, (where the stone, lapis, was mined).	From Persia.
From India.	From Solferino, Italy (where a battle was fought in 1859, the same year the dye was discovered).
From Tyre, ancient Phoenicia, modern-day Lebanon.	From Magenta, Italy.
From Damascus (where the plum tree grows).	From Mocha, Yemen (a port from which coffee was exported).
From Gagas, Lycia, modern-day Turkey.

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Over the years we’ve all come across color changing products that may have been amazing or disappointing - especially disappointing if you tried to wash you hypercolor t-shirt using hot water only to find out that you have now permanently changed it to the lighter color, but since those trying days of the 80’s and 90’s, color changing products have continued to develop.

Now, many researchers have applied some of the science behind color changing for applications in public safety, like when water is hot, or streets are cold and covered in ice, and they have also developed some technologies that would allow us to change the color of our cars and clothing with the push of a button. Here is a look at some of the color changing products currently available or in development.

Car Paint

Photo from gizmodo

With a switch of a button your car could change color. Scientist have developed a material that uses an electrical charge to create different colors. The Coating has the ability to reproduce the full spectrum of colors, and it only takes about a second to change from one color to another.

The process starts out with a standard galvanized piece of automotive sheet metal steel. A special polymer is applied to the steel with superparamagnetic iron oxide particles embedded within it. The nanoscale crystalline particles of magnetite (iron oxide) are controlled using a low grade magnetic field which is used to effect the spacing of the colloidal crystals and thereby controlling their ability to reflect light and change color.

Note: Nissan is not actually releasing this product.

Faucets

A number of faucets have been designed to change from blue to red as the temperature of the water increases. They simply use some sort of temperature sensor and a LED light, but can be very helpful in warning of a potential burn situation.

Wall Paint

Eclipse wall paint from Alsacorp will get lighter when heat of some kind is applied. It is also available with extra effects called CrystalFX, SpectraFX or Funky Munkey.

Candles

At frst these candles seemed like they had been touched with ‘the magic’ until I read a little more and discovered that there is a LED light in the bottom, but the fact that it turns on when you light the wick, using an optical sensor, is impressive enough to include in the lineup.


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“In deciding upon a proper color, neither the zodiacal nor the planetary values should be considered separately but blended as an artist mixes paints upon his palette.” - Manly P. Hall

There are many theories as to which color is associated with each segment of the zodiac. While there does seem to be some sort of consensus among experts, and non-experts alike, large discrepancies still exsist , even in the COLOURlovers library.

Today we are going to look at three theories. Two put together from historical references from Manly P. Hall and Finnish astrologer Juhani Nummela, and a newer theory proposed over at astrologyweekly.com. Plus, we’ll see what people in the COLOURlovers community think their colors are.

Colors associated with the 360 degrees of zodiac

The visible part of spectre of electromagnetic waves is what we call light. More exactly, from the entire range of electromagnetic radiations, the human eye can only perceive those with the wavelength between 380 and 780 nanometers (nm). Below 380 nm, there is the ultraviolet radiation, beyond 780 nm there is the infrared range.

I think there is a correlation between the visible light of different wavelenghts and the zodiac: the visible spectre begins with red and ends with violet, this can be associated with the range of 360 degrees of the zodiac, from Aries to Pisces.

Since the light with a wavelenght of 780 nm is a red light, and the light with a wavelenght of 380 nm is a violet light, a correlation can be considered between the light of 780 nm and 0 degrees Aries and so on, ending with a correlation between the light of 380 nm and 29 degrees Pisces.
- astrologyweekly.com

Aries

Manly P. Hall: brilliant red
Juhani Nummela: red, carmine red
astrologyweekly.com: between 780nm #610000 - 747nm #A70000

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